Humor

Things that make me laugh, or that I think will make others laugh.

Faux Klingons

by

I just heard about this through last Sunday’s ‘Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!‘ show (which I just found out is available as a podcast, since I never manage to remember to turn on the actual radio), and I think this might be the best Iraq War analogy I’ve heard yet:

One Minute Speech by Rep. David Wu, D-Oregon, 1st District, Portland:

Mr. Speaker,

Four years ago, this administration took America to war in Iraq without adequate evidence. Since that time, this administration hasn’t listened to the American people, it hasn’t listened to our professional military, and it certainly hasn’t listened to this congress.

You know, it’s said of a prominent businessman in downtown Portland that he never listened to anybody, and that if he was ever drawn in a cartoon, he would be drawn without ears. Now, this President has listened to some people: the so-called ‘Vulcans’ in the White House, the ideologues. But you know, unlike the Vulcans of Star Trek, who made their decisions based on logic and fact, these guys make it on ideology. These aren’t Vulcans! There are Klingons in the White House!

But unlike the real Klingons of Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own. Don’t let faux Klingons send real Americans to war. It’s wrong.

So. Very. Awesome. I love this.

Apparently, there’s a book out called Rise of the Vulcans focusing on Bush’s core advisors, who have dubbed themselves “Vulcans” after the Roman god of War. Wu just took the Vulcan thing and ran with it. In entirely the wrong direction.

4,000 Lattes…to go?

by

From this morning’s introduction of the iPhone, as Steve Jobs was demonstrating various features of the gadget (as reported by MacRumors):

10:27 am finds moscone west
10:27 am finds a nearby starbucks
10:27 am presses a button and calls starbucks
crowd laughs
10:27 am orders 4000 latte’s to go
10:27 am oh sorry – wrong number
10:28 am hangs up

Prank calling Starbucks live on stage at MacWorld? Nicely done, Steve! ;)

(via blog.ariffic)

Weekly World News

by

Best discovery of the past couple weeks: the Weekly World News (sorry, Seattle Weekly and Stranger, but this is my favorite weekly newspaper) has an RSS feed.

I mean, really — how could I survive without knowing about this kind of breaking news?

Dreaded Hot Tub Kraken Menaces Hotel Guests:

A squid infestation has forced the closure of Hollerheim Suites’ flagship hotel.

“The creature is viscid enough to dart through the hotel’s narrow plumbing,” said squid abatement expert Erik Pontoppidan. “It surfaces in guests’ bubble baths, coils hapless bathers in its tentacles, and vanishes again in a deadly but invigorating whirlpool.”

So far, no guests have been seriously hurt, though one bather did emerge, wet and dazed, from a bidet three rooms down the hall from his suite.

“In all of these cases the kraken was successfully repelled with a loofah,” Pontoppidan explained.

Five Injured When Ouija Planchette Leaps From Board in Search of Semicolon:

Five people were injured last week when a planchette–the device which points to letters and numbers on Ouija Boards–flew violently out of a house in search of a semicolon.

The planchette went rogue when Kelly Smerton, eleven, and her sister Karen, twelve, inadvertently channelled the spirit of a deceased English teacher.

“Apparently he was a pretty mean one,” said Deborah Smerton, the girls’ mother.

At the end of an independent clause condemning the Smerton house as a “den of ignoramuses,” the ghost suddenly flung the planchette out of the girl’s hands, shattering the bay window of their bedroom.

Happy Holidays from Me, Prairie…and Flickr

by

Firefoxscreensnapz003

A bit of silliness on Flickr these days: if you add a note that says simply ‘ho ho ho hat’ to a photo, Flickr will add a Santa hat to the photo where the note is placed.

There’s a few people getting up in arms about the ‘defacement’ of their photos, but if you decide you don’t like this, you can simply delete the note. I see it as a harmless bit of holiday silliness.

And I like harmless silliness.

So Long, Space Needle

by

Thank goodness we have the journalistic integrity of the Weekly World News to fill us in on what’s really going on in our city…

The Space Needle will once again become this city’s tallest building in April 2009, when NASA launches the tower into Earth orbit.

The unmanned mission will test the landmark’s suitability for carrying astronauts to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

“We hope this flight will point us in the direction of cheaper modes of space travel,” said Project Director Mike Dale.

Early next year, NASA engineers will remove the 72 bolts anchoring the Needle to her 6,000-ton concrete foundation. Construction cranes will lower the building onto its side, and a convoy of trucks will transport the structure to Cape Canaveral, using the straightest roads possible.

“There, the building will be thoroughly caulked against the vaccuum of space,” Mr. Dale said.

The Needle’s elevator shaft will be filled with rocket fuel, her antennas will be oriented toward Houston, and her manned explorations of the solar system will begin no later than 2014, according to Dale.

Despite the reduced costs to NASA, the Space Needle project represents a giant leap in astronaut amenities.

“The rotating restaurant will provide simulated Earth gravity, not to mention fresh salmon and Dungeness crab from Washington and Alaska waters,” Dale said.

“It was NASA spacecraft that originally inspired the tower’s architecture,” Dale reflected from his seat in the Needle’s whirling restaurant. “But now the tables are turning.”

(via seattle)

Pop Culture Disconnect

by

This week in my History 101 class (covering everything up to 1500), we’re looking at Ghengis Khan, Kublai Khan, and the Mongols. The professor spent a few minutes talking about the Mongol’s invasion techniques, which were simple but could be fairly ruthless: if armies surrendered they’d be treated fairly well; if they fought, they’d often be razed to the ground and completely destroyed. After summarizing this, he commented, “really, they were pretty close to the Borg.”

I chuckled, and there was a moment of quiet while he took a sip of his tea. Then one of the girls in the class slightly timidly asked, “…what’s ‘the borg’?”

Sigh. I’m getting old.

Dangerous Feet and Good Diction

by

My Work Study job at NSCC is as a tutor in The Loft, the school’s writing center. Many of the students we have stopping by are ESL and foreign language students, sometimes working their way through ESL classes, sometimes in the standard English classes.

As English is their second (sometimes third or fourth) language, we do a lot of work helping them navigate their way through the various intricacies and oddities of the English language…of which there are many. It’s fun to do, and at times, it can be quite funny, as well. Nothing makes you really think about just how goofy our language is until you’re trying to explain it to a non-native speaker.

For instance, it wasn’t until I was working on deconstructing part of a girl’s paper where she had written about people who were being murdered by their feet that I really thought about how nonsensical the phrase “my feet are killing me” really is. The best part was that her usage was perfect, describing how people felt after a long day standing in lines — but it only works if you use the phrase just so. Move it around and reword it, and it turns into something entirely different.

I’m also running into an issue that I certainly wouldn’t have predicted beforehand, in that at times I speak a little too precisely. Yesterday I had an ESL student in who was working on hearing the difference between “can” and “can’t” when listening to spoken English. One of the key points her teacher had touched on and that her exercise mentioned was that most people tend not to pronounce the final ‘t’ in “can’t” — rather, it’s usually just a very brief pause after the word. She had a list of sentences that she wanted me to read, some of which used “can” and some of which used “can’t”.

The only problem was that my diction is unusually good. Between having parents who share a love of the English language and spending years in a professional children’s choir, I speak far more precisely than most people do, and I was pronouncing the ‘t’ every single time. “No, no,” she would say. “I hear the ‘t’ — do it again.” Eventually, we were both laughing, as I had to try to explain how difficult it was for me to intentionally mispronounce the word. It’s incredibly difficult for me to do. In the end, I had to suggest that she find a different tutor to work that particular exercise with.

On the flip side, though, I’ve had a couple of the other students quite happy to work with me, precisely because my diction is that good. Apparently I’m easier to understand than many other English speakers, as long as I don’t go too quickly. I see a lot of pronunciation drills in my future….

iTunes “Everybody Wants the Same Thing” by Scissor Sisters from the album Ta-Dah (2006, 4:22).

Desperation

by

Heh.

Someone just came to my site via a Google search for “oh god give me a job i need a fucking job just give me a job i want a job okay“.

As if that search string isn’t amusing enough on its own, wanna take a guess at which page they landed at? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. ;)

iTunes “Material Girl” by K.M.F.D.M. from the album Virgin Voices: A Tribute to Madonna Vol. 1 (1999, 4:27).